


Teachable Moment

by orphan



Series: Frankenstein and the Newt [9]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Kaiju Newton Geiszler, Not Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) Compliant, POV Outsider, kinda meta i guess, lol plotvomit, monsterfucker gets best job ever, side effect include high risk of brain worms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:40:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25876039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan/pseuds/orphan
Summary: Ela Kaya is seven the first time she sees a kaiju.
Series: Frankenstein and the Newt [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/377038
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	Teachable Moment

**Author's Note:**

> Haha phew good thing we got that whole series finale out of thblllluuurrrrgggghhhhh _*vomits 10k of OC outsider-POV plot with a 6k mainship pornfeels chaser_.
> 
>  _Save your eyes for this place_  
>  _Where I define you, myth or desire_  
>  _When it's true love,[you held dear](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MltY7S3IOog)._  
> 

Ela Kaya is seven the first time she sees a kaiju. She’s woken from her bed by the sound of her father, sobbing, and her mother, trying desperately to comfort him. Ela is too young to truly understand what she’s seeing when she crawls from her room, hiding out of sight behind the counter. The television is playing and Ela crouches in awe as she watches the creature that will soon be called Trespasser tear apart a city, half a world away.

And in that moment, Ela cries too. Not in fear, like her father, but because she has never in her short life seen something so beautiful.

* * *

“I can’t believe they brought it _here_.”

The year is 2033, and San Francisco is rebuilding. Slowly. Ela is standing wedged between Maria and Chloe and a thousand other people on Hawk Hill. Below, in the bay, the creature they call Otouto crouches, quiet and placid, as the government and the PPDC conduct a press conference in its dripping shadow.

“I think they thought it would be, like. Y’know. Symbolic,” Maria says, and Chloe makes a disgusted noise.

“It’s fucked up, is what it is.”

“They’re talking about having it help tear down the remains of the Wall,” says a man to their left. “Now _that’s_ fucked up. Aliens! Stealing good, solid, American jobs!”

“Oh yeah that’s _definitely_ the worst thing wrong with that plan,” Maria mutters, not loud enough for Jobs Advocate to hear.

As far as Ela can tell, about half the people on there hill are here to protest, the rest out of morbid curiosity. And then there are the . . . people like her. Scattered in between. The people with eyes filled with wonder, not loathing; who cry from hope, no fear. They don’t talk about it—from fear mostly, kaiju apologetics can still get you killed, in some places—but Ela sees them, and she knows they see her.

“I hear it’s the cultists who are going absolutely nuts,” says Chloe. “I guess that happens, when one of your fucked-up ‘gods’ defects and tries to sign up with the people trying to kill it.”

“They aren’t gods,” Ela says. “They’re just . . . creatures. Living creatures.”

“Yeah, really, really, _really_ fucking big ‘creatures’ that tried to destroy the planet for like a decade,” from Maria. “I still think they should just kill it.”

“He surrendered,” Ela says, quietly. “We couldn’t.” If they did, what would that make them?

“Bullshit it did. So it stopped attacking. So what? It was outgunned. But as soon as it’s got an opening, it’ll start again, just you wait. You can’t trust any of those filthy monsters. Pretending they’re . . . they’re _people_ with like feelings or whatever is fucked the hell up. They’re violent monsters and they want to kill us. That’s the only thing anyone needs to know about them.”

There are two Jaeger in the bay, flanking Otouto. He noses at one, gently curious, and the pilots nearly throw a punch in response. He backs down immediately, making a trilling sort of sound they can hear even from here and, after a moment, the Jaeger slowly lowers its fist.

“See?” Maria says, pointing as if the meekly cowering creature is somehow proving her point. “What did I tell you? Violent. Monsters. The PPDC is crazy to try and pretend otherwise. And people are gonna fucking die for it, just you wait.”

“Apparently they’re trying to recruit someone to Drift with it,” Chloe says. “To, like. Control it or whatever. Cheaper than a Jaeger.”

Maria has opinions on this, too. Loud ones. But Ela isn’t listening; she’s too transfixed by the creature below, looking up at them, now, eyes beautiful and alien and strange.

* * *

Chloe is right; the PPDC _is_ recruiting someone for what it calls the Extraterrestrial Communication and Development Programme. The press conference was, in part, to announce applications were being opened to public submission. Heart hammering and feeling very foolish—even though she’s at home, alone, and there’s no one to judge her but her browser history—Ela opens the website and reads the criteria. They are . . . broad. Very broad. Really “any living adult human person” broad.

That night, Ela stares at her bedroom ceiling, mind racing, sleep as distant as the stars.

At 2:48am she eventually gives up trying to sleep, gets up, goes to her laptop, and starts drafting an application.

* * *

Six weeks later, somehow, she’s sitting in the waiting room of a testing center she was driven to in the back of a windowless van, after signing a hundred pages of the most terrifying NDA she’s ever encountered. And the enormous, black-suited, heavily tattooed bodyguards all over the place are not doing anything to dispel the rumors that the PPDC’s K-Science division has ties to the Hong Kong triads.

“You’ll have to excuse the secrecy,” says the man who comes to collect her. “But we’ve already had several candidates drop out due to threats and pressure from their families.”

“ . . . Oh.” Ela’s parents moved back to Turkey during the War. They have absolutely no idea she’s here, and she intends to keep it that way. “I . . . that won’t be a problem.”

“We’ll see. Follow me, please.”

The tests are . . . weird. Ela gets a brain scan in a machine that looks a bit like a Pons but isn’t, then has spend an hour doing a bunch of focus and concentration exercises, then another brain scan. Then . . . yoga? Of all things? Then another set of weird concentration puzzles _in_ the brain scan machine. The entire time, the examiner—who never does give Ela a name—makes noncommittal noises and taps into a tablet. At the end of the session Ela is exhausted, even though she hasn’t really _done_ very much, strictly speaking. The examiner gives her a cookie, then loads her back into the terrifying mafia kidnap van, which seems to drive three loops around the city, and Ela is just starting to get worried when it rolls to a stop right outside her apartment door.

Ela eats her cookie (chocolate chip, pretty good actually) and immediately falls asleep for the rest of the afternoon.

Somehow, she gets through to the second round.

* * *

The second round is a phone call, and surprisingly generic. It’s about an hour of a woman who introducers herself as Stacey—but with an accent that suggest otherwise—grilling Ela on her CV, her job history, her current work, her professional goals. Plus a bunch of the other bog standard interview questions; her biggest weakness, a time she experienced failure, a time she overcame fear. Ela spends the entire time dutifully answering and wondering when the real interview was going to start—something about the position, about the kaiju or the War or Otouto or _anything_ —and then nearly cries when the woman hangs up with a curt, perfunctory, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

A day later, they do.

A week after that, Ela is on a plane to Hong Kong. First class. Ela’s never flown first class before—Ela’s never even flow business class before—and suspects it has permanently ruined air travel for her forever. There’s a car waiting for her at the airport, with regulation-issue triad goon driver, who actually turns out to be extremely nice and who gives Ela a list of things to do for her first time in the city. When he drops her off outside the Kowloon Shangri-La Ela starts believing this entire trip may be less on the PPDC’s dime and that maybe all those rumors about K-Science’s outsourced lab might be truer than she’d been assuming.

Well, too late to back out now. Either Ela has a fun three day luxury holiday or she ends up in a bathtub somewhere with her kidneys missing. Not much she can do about it now either way, so she takes Nice Goon’s advice and also the MTR into SoHo for dinner and sightseeing. It’s pouring rain the entire time and the neon lights glimmer off every surface and somewhere between her second cocktail and trying not to fall off the precariously-narrow and ridiculously high sidewalks (which . . . _why_? What kind of city _does_ that?), Ela thinks that maybe she never wants to leave.

She wakes up the next day with a hangover and an interview.

* * *

On the internet, Ela’s name is tentaclespls. No one, absolutely _no one_ , in her real life knows this. She has a bland, mostly disused Facebook under her actual name she gives people when they ask about her social media and an Instagram as elkay to which she occasionally posts photos of food. And everywhere else . . .

Ela has . . . tastes. Ela’s tastes have fangs and claws and tails and scales and, yes, tentacles. Please. (Yes _please_.) It’s not even always a sex thing (though it’s totally a sex thing). She just . . . likes monsters. Of all kinds. According to her parents, when she was three, she’d cried at the end of _Beauty and the Beast_ when Beast had turned back into a human. And maybe it’s weird but it’s not like she’s hurting anyone, and there are totally worse things in life to be into, she knows.

And then, a year or so ago, _WIRED_ had published an article titled “Kaiju: Final Wars” and every single one of Ela’s secret chatrooms had lost. Their. Shit. And Ela, like many of her other secret friends, had discovered a new obsession.

Ela, to put is mildly, is a Newt Stan. She’s made fancams. She’s _known_ for them. She’s downloaded every single one of the tracks he’s covered on his YouTube channel—even the shitty early ones when he kept (mostly) off camera and was still re-learning how to play with his new fingers—and listens to them on iTunes. On repeat. And she has even, in her time, written long and glowing comments on other people’s RPF porn and occasionally seriously considered writing her own.

And all of this, absolutely all of it, goes through her head the second she opens the door to an innocuously opulent room in the Shangri-La’s business centre, to come face-to-six-eyed-face with the man himself.

He’s . . . lying, she supposes, propped up in the room’s far corner, one of his big arms draped over a desk positioned in front of him. Sort of the equivalent pose of someone rocking back in a chair with their feet up, albeit for someone who no longer has a working relationship with chairs. The room is not very big and Doctor Geiszler ( _don’t call him Newt to his face don’t call him Newt to his face don’t_ ) takes up so much of it the end of his tail extends up the wall. A dim part of Ela suspects this may be deliberate—if she can’t walk into a tiny space with a kaiju this is not a job she should be applying for—but most of her is frozen in the doorframe, blushing so hard she’s surprised she doesn’t catch fire right there and then.

And then Doctor Geiszler says:

“All right, which one are you? Ella? Right, whatever. Come in, sit down. Let’s get this over with.”

And _it_ is him talking. Or rather, his (sort of . . . irritating) voice; Ela knows this, because Ela is the sort of person who visits the sort of place that has obsessively archived every bit of video and audio footage from Doctor Geiszler’s human days. Today, he’s currently signing with his small hands and the voice has a synthetic quality to it, a flat and not entirely natural inflection, and seems to be coming from his laptop speakers. And what Ela says in response to it is:

“Ela. My name . . . it’s pronounced Ela.”

“Oh, yeah cool,” says the laptop of Doctor Geiszler. “Sorry, Herms is still working out some of the phonemes for the gloves. It’s not great with names in particular. Come in. Shut the door.”

On his small hands, he’s wearing . . . they aren’t gloves, exactly, because Doctor Geiszler’s fingers are webbed to the first joint. More like an arrangement of rings and bracelets in chrome and blinking LED. To help him speak to people who can’t understand his signing.

Very carefully, trying not to let any of the maelstrom of emotions show in her face, Ela walks into the room, closes the door, and sits down. The chair brings her very, very close to the arm Doctor Geiszler has draped across the desk. She could reach out and touch it. She could _touch a kaiju_. She does not.

“Right,” Doctor Geiszler says. “You’re the preschool teacher, yeah?”

“Early childhood educator,” Ela says, “but yes.”

“Alright. Weird, but alright. So tell me, E-L-A”—he fingerspells it for the synthesizer—“the preschool teacher . . . why do _you_ want to make the mind-kissies with a daikaiju?”

Ela does not blurt out her immediate reaction to this ( _“Um are you_ kidding _me? Who wouldn’t?”_ ) and instead manages her way through a spiel about developmental goals and how she feels her background and experience would be beneficial to the planet and the PPDC. Geiszler keeps pushing back, questions bordering on hostile. All, _yeah sure but what do_ you _want_ and _why you, out of every single person on the planet_ and Ela has had worse interviews, maybe, but never before has she been so utterly stonewalled by an interviewer. And she knows, as much as any stranger can know, what Doctor Geiszler is like. Arrogant, abrasive, assholish; the smartest guy in the room, always. And _angry_. Ela has read every interview the man has ever done, has spent hours listening to him thrash his way through punk and metal and industrial and aggrotech on his guitar, and that undercurrent is always there. Doctor Geiszler is a man who’s dedicated his life to raging against the world, the universe, the Anteverse, and as Ela is thinking this she blurts:

“May I ask a question?”

Doctor Geiszler blinks at her, a rolling wave of light across his broad face. When he gestures for her to go ahead, the claws of his big hand are close enough for Ela to feel the air they displace as they move.

“Is . . . Excuse me for for asking this, but . . . is it me you have a problem with? Or is it the program?”

And Doctor Geiszler stares at her, then stares some more, then says:

“You know how many people on this crapsack planet have Drifted with a rotting chunk of kaiju brain? Exactly two. You know how many people have done it _twice_ , and done it solo, like they’re talking about doing with you? One: Me. And you know what? It. Fucked. Me. Up. Probably worse than we realize. Everyone thinks this”—a gesture at himself—“was the worst fucking thing that’s ever happened to me but you know the fuck what? I think they don’t know shit. Cause let me tell you exactly what’s gonna happen to you; they’re gonna strap you in that chair, and drill a fucking hole right. Here.” A huge claw, pressed against her forehead. “And the Anteverse is gonna reach it’s filthy little podomere through and just . . . swizzle around like your brain’s a fucking mojito and then they’re gonna start taking little sips.” He makes the sound, grotesque and alien from his inhuman maw. “And then one day you’ll look in the mirror and the thing that smiles back won’t be you anymore. It’ll be nothing, just a black fucking hole in the shape of a girl.”

He leans back, suddenly, and it’s only from the distance that Ela realizes how close he’d been leaning. Glowing eyes and huge teeth, and when he falls back, the room shakes.

“I’ve told the fucking Security Council their little fucking shitshow is a suicide mission. For us, I mean. For you, well. Suicide would be the easy option. But they don’t trust a kaiju when they don’t think it has a human holding its leash. So yeah, if they’re determined to go ahead with this uranium rod juggling act it’s up to me to try and make sure the least possible number of people fucking die when it all goes supercritical. That honest enough an answer for you? E-L-A the preschool teacher? Got anymore questions for me?”

And Ela’s mouth is gaping and her heat is hammering and, oh god, when she speaks her voice is broken and squeaky and what comes out is:

“How do you cut your claws?” Because he’s been waving them in her face and she can still feel the press of one against her skin and she can see the edges are cut, not worn, and oh god _did she just ask that_? Did she really just ask a _Nobel laureate_ about his manicure?

He’s just staring at her, gape-mawed, then: “What. The fuck?” Still in that strange, affectless, neutral sarcasm. He looks at her, then his eyes flick down. To where she’s wringing her own hands in her lap. To her own manicure, three days old and still immaculate; charcoal grey flecked with kaiju blue, bREACH’s lacquer and . . . god. She’s so _stupid_.

And as she’s halfway through stuttering out an apology he says:

“Big fuck-off diamond-bladed bolt cutters I steal from the j-techs when they’re not looking.”

“Oh,” says Ela. “R-right.”

“You know Lena, our daughter. She keeps threatening to paint them; she’s at that age, y’know. I tell her she doesn’t have a bottle of lacquer big enough.” A pause. “Also I’m not entirely sure how the polymers will react. Finding out hasn’t, like, been all that high up on the priority list. I don’t wanna accidentally gas her or whatever.” He taps a claw against the desk. “Maybe I should put someone on that. Could be useful...” Not really to her, just thinking out loud.

There’s a pause, awkward, and eventually Ela gets the courage to fill it with: “The . . . things you said before. About the— the Programme. Is that why you keep asking me the wrong questions?”

Doctor Geiszler widens the eyes on one side of his face, squinting the others. Quizzical, maybe. Or incredulous. He’s very . . . expressive. Over-animated, almost cartoonish. Ela wonders how intentional it is, how much it comes naturally and how much he puts it on for the humans around him.

“You think I’m asking the wrong questions?”

“I think . . . You keep asking about me. But this isn’t about me, not really.”

“Then who’s it about?”

“Otouto.” She’s been practicing saying it correctly, the Japanese vowels not coming quite so naturally. “This is for him, isn’t it?”

“How so?”

“I just . . . I saw him, in San Fransisco. And . . . this must be so strange for him. A whole new universe, like nothing he’s ever known. And he’s . . . he’s curious, isn’t he? He tried to . . . the Jaeger. Nothing here is his size but they are, and he tried to . . . to say hello. And it almost attacked him.” And, oh god, she’s crying just thinking about it. She told herself she wouldn’t cry. Tears streaming through her make up but now she’s started she just can’t stop and she says: “And he just . . . he looked so _sad_. It must be so lonely for him here. People hate him. They want him dead, talk about him like he’s just . . . just some _thing_. Not even an animal, just some machine to be controlled. And it’s not right! I know— I know people are scared and they have a right to be but he must be scared too! He must be! But he stopped fighting anyway, as soon as he could, you said. That has to mean something. We have to _make_ it mean something, or else we’re no better than _they_ are, and then what’s the point? Of this whole War. What’s the _point_ of winning it if we become no better than the things we’re fighting! I just, I have to—” And oh god she said that. She said that out loud, and Doctor Geiszler is staring at her again, mouth open in horror, and finally, _finally_ , she manages to make her own awful mouth shut the hell up. “Sorry.” She looks away, sniffling. Can’t meet Doctor Geiszler’s eyes. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“Nope.” He slaps a claw down on the desk. “Enough. That’s enough. We’re done here. You can go.”

Ela opens her mouth, realizes she has nothing else to say; no way to . . . un-say the things she did say. So she stands, readjusts her skirt and sniffs and tries to collect her dignity as best she can. “I . . . I’m sorry. Th-thank you for your time,” she manages, cheeks burning, eyes still fixed on the floor. Then she all-but flees from the room.

At the elevators, hands shaking, she hears a man in one of the lounge chairs mutter:

“Every. Time. Every time I think you’ve managed to unearth the last doe-eyed naïf of a kaiju groupie on this whole rotten planet you prove me wrong. It’s disgusting.” Then a pause, then: “You are truly obscene. And that’s _Doctor_ Hypocrite to _you_ , thank you very much.”

Ela flees, feeling very small and very stupid.

Barely six hours after she’s returned to the States, the voice of Doctor Hypocrite calls her up, introduces itself as Doctor Hermann Gottlieb, and tells her that, “if you’re still determined to throw your brain away on the Security Council’s idiot idea, then the position is yours. Commiserations, truly.”

* * *

Ela tells Chloe and Maria the next morning, over breakfast in their tiny, ancient shared kitchen. Once she’s done, Chloe stands up and, wordlessly, retreats to her room and slams the door. She will never speak to Ela again, though Ela doesn’t know that at the time.

Maria, on the other hand, panics. “Ela honey you can’t. You can’t do this. I don’t care what they’ll pay you! It’s not _safe_.”

“It’s not about the money,” Ela says, which is true enough even though, yes, the pay is certainly more than her current work at the childcare centre. “And I know there are . . . risks.” She tries not to think of a claw pressing against her forehead, not quite hard enough to bruise. “But the PPDC—”

“Are monsters!” Maria blurts. “That _thing_ gave them all brain worms and now they’re— they’re taking over! They’re working for the kaiju! Infecting everyone with this virus to turn us all into their slaves!”

“I—” Ela starts, then stops. It’s not like she doesn’t know this is what Maria believes. But: “I don’t . . . I don’t think it’s like that. I met Doctor Geiszler and—”

“Ohmigawd it gave _you_ brain worms!”

“He didn’t—”

“We have to get you checked! Right now!” She gets halfway out of her chair before Ela drags her back down.

“Mar, please! I don’t have brain worms, I promise!” Ela who does not, it must be said, share her friend’s horror re. this idea in general, but who wisely decides not to mention as much.

“Ela—”

“No, listen. Please. I know it’s . . . scary. But he wasn’t . . .” She stops, uncertain. Honestly, until Doctor Gottlieb had assured her otherwise on the phone, Ela had assumed Doctor Geiszler loathed her. ( _“For pity’s sake, girl. You cried over a kaiju because you were worried it felt_ sad _. How do you think he reacted?”_ ) “We talked about manicures,” she says, finally. “And his daughter. He’s just . . . he’s just a person, Mar.”

Maria chews her lip, still standing, but no longer trying to forcibly drag Ela out the door. “Oh honey,” she finally says. “You’re too soft-hearted, you know that? It’s _dangerous_. Drifting with another human is dangerous. What they’re talking about . . .” Maria, the neurology student.

“I know,” Ela says. “I know it’s dangerous. I know I might . . .” She makes herself say it. If she can’t say it, she doesn’t deserve to be the one who does it. “I know I might die.”

“Or worse!”

Ela nods. “Or worse. I know. And . . . I’m scared. I’m really, really scared. But I want to do this. I want to try.”

Maria sighs, sits heavily back down in her chair. “I just . . . I just don’t see why it has to be _you_. God knows I love you, E, but you? You’re—” _Nobody_ , she doesn’t say. Cutting herself off, looking away, ashamed.

 _I think that’s the exactly point,_ Ela does not reply.

* * *

After that, telling her parents is easy.

* * *

“There she is! Our newest groupie!”

And suddenly it’s eight weeks later, and Ela is, for the first time, walking through the oddly unassuming doors and into the oddly unassuming foyer of K2 Tower.

The voice that greets her is broad and surprisingly deep; accent Australian, maybe, but starting to acquire some local clipping around the vowels. Its owner bounds over to her, all five-foot-nothing of a young Asian woman about Ela’s age, wearing dirty trainers and ripped jeans and a cartoon kaiju t-shirt under her lab coat. Ela immediately feels ditzy and overdressed in her designer clothes and fussy hairstyle and contoured makeup. Stupid. It’s a lab, not a nightclub. Who’s she trying to impress?

“I’m Vi,” says the woman, throwing out a hand for Ela to shake. “You must be Ela. Welcome to K2! Excited to join the freakshow?”

“Um. Yes. Um... I’m looking forward to working with everyone?” Ela tries.

“We’re all _super_ jazzed to have you. Doc’s been talking about you non-stop for like a month. But Doc talks like non-stop full-stop, so don’t freak out. C’mon, everything should be set up, so let’s get you your pass and do the tour, okay?”

The logistics of the day are handled by the . . . receptionist? Ela supposes, purely by the fact she’s sitting behind the foyer’s front desk. She’s wearing a tailored black suit, black shirt, black tie, an electric blue fauxhawk, and has enough piercings to be producing her own magnetic field. She also almost certainly has a gun beneath her jacket, and a tattoo of a vulture on the underside of her wrist.

“Thanks, Blue!” Vi tells her once Ela’s been handed a black pass card embossed with K2’s logo; an unassuming helix in shimmering metallic blue.

“You have fun, kids. Try not to blow anything up.”

“No promises bye!” And Vi is looping her arm with Ela’s, dragging her over to a bank of elevators. “Ground floor is foyer, conference rooms. Basements are storage, also you can dump your bike there if you ride. B1, though, definitely, unless you want to reek of dead kaiju on your commute. What else? Oh, um. Yes it always smells like that, you do get used to it but if it gets too much there’s a great area on the roof to get some fresh air.” They step into the lift, the door closing with a soft chime. “This is the fake lift,” Vi continues. “It only goes up like one floor, then we have to get into the real lift. This place used to be, like, a triad den so there’s some weird shit like that. Secret rooms and stuff, you’ll be fine though.”

“Um,” says Ela. “About the, um—”

“Oh yeah this hundred percent a mob front operation,” Vi adds, cheerfully, as if this is a completely normal thing to admit. “So if you see scary people with vulture tattoos following you around the city, don’t worry; they’re _your_ security detail. Also all the actual illegal stuff is, like, way separate. K2 really is just a lab, and we really do help the PPDC save the world. And Hannibal mostly just does, like, dodgy kaiju black market whatever nowadays. Big ol’ white guy, velvet suits, tiny sunglasses; he comes around to argue with the Docs sometimes and see what everyone is up to. He won’t mess with you. We make him rich and he’s like everyone’s shady grandpa.”

“Hannibal _Chau_?” Oh god forget drilling a hole in her brain. Apparently Ela’s joined the mafia.

“That’s the one!” The doors open, and Ela is dragged through into a space that . . . looks like a perfectly ordinary lab? She thinks? She hasn’t been in a lab since high school, but if asked to describe what she thought one looked like, this would be it.

“Okay,” Vi says. “So this is like LoHaz, the general floor. Get yourself a coat and some eyeware if you’re going near anything flammable or toxic, but mostly this floor is modeling and paperwork. Pretty safe. And this is The Line. You’re one of the cool kids so you hang over on this side with us.” Vi very dramatically steps onto the right side of the room, dragging Ela with her. “We do not cross the line! No scabs on Team Rockstar.”

“Oi, I hear you talking crap, Lee!” A purple-haired head pokes itself over a partition. “Pons tech is Team Cosmos.”

“And xenoneurology is Rockstar,” Vi calls back, cheerfully. “Write a complaint and die mad about it, nerd.”

Said nerd flips her off. “Yeah well when Big Sis is done playing with _babies_ she can come hang out with the real adults doing real science.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “Welcome to K2, Ms. Kaya. Totally stoked to have you!”

“Um. Thank you?” And then Vi is dragging her away, so Ela asks: “What happens if someone crosses the line?”

“Well, I mean. Nothing? But why would you? Maths, gross.”

And Ela . . . giggles. Because she knows about The Line. Of course she does, it _prominently_ features in many of the fics she’s starting to realize she will never be able to read ever again.

“Speaking of,” Vi adds, weaving between workstations of people who wave and call greetings. “If the Docs start screaming at each other? And especially if they start throwing things, and _especially_ especially if they’re screaming in German—I mean, you can only hear Doctor Gottlieb’s half but, like, you’ll know. If they do that? Lunchtime. Immediately. Doesn’t matter if it’s like 6am, or 11pm, or whatever. They’re totally about to bone so, like. Lunchtime. Cause yeah there is a _nonzero_ quantity of xeno-slash-teratophilia that goes on in this building and like I guess if that bothered you you wouldn’t be here, yeah? But like, it’s one thing to be all like, ‘lol I read about that on the AO3’ and _totally different_ when you’re just trying to get a form signed and you walk in on alien nookie and it’s _your boss_. So knock. Always. And wait for an answer.”

“Oh . . . gosh,” says Ela who . . . is honestly trying not to think about things like that in a professional setting.

“I’m probably making things sound way hornier than they are? But, like, high stress job, you know? End of the world, et cetera. No one’s gonna like hassle you but people hook up, yeah? We once had to have an entire ethics panel because a janitor walked in on Carlos and Jan blowing each other in front of Aurora’s tank. And it’s like . . . is that non-consensually involving a third party in a sex act? Aurora, I mean, not the janitor. Then Doc pointed out she’d be able to tell every time _he_ got laid because of how the hive mind works, then Doctor Gottlieb went this _amazing_ color and had to leave the room and didn’t come back for, like. A month.” Then, without so much as taking a breath: “Have I scared you off, yet?”

“No,” says Ela, honestly. Then, in the interest of _complete_ honesty: “Well, the part about the mob was a bit . . . um . . .”

“Right?” Vi explodes, eyes widening. “But, like. Apparently it’s a holdover from the War or something? I guess even crooks and gangsters have an interest in the world not ending? Also seriously, Hannibal is just, like, office grandpa, and his Vultures will look after you.”

Ela nods, not quite biting her lip to not quite smear her lipstick. She knows there’ve been . . . incidents. With K2. They might be saving the world, but a hell of a lot of people don’t approve of how they’re doing it.

By now, they’ve come to a stop next to a surprisingly normal-looking office cubicle. From the photos pinned to the walls, Ela realizes it must be Vi’s. Vi, who’s picking something grey and familiar from her keyboard.

“Here,” she says, handing it to Ela. “It’s—”

“Doctor K.” Ela has one of the plushies herself at home. It cost a mint, but she _had_ to have it. Nowadays, the resemblance to Doctor Geiszler is undeniable.

Unlike Ela’s doll—pristine, albeit well-cuddled—this one is . . . damaged. Half-burned, re-sewn, one arm replaced by a patchwork facsimile in a completely different fabric.

“He kept having, uh. Lab accidents,” Vi explains. “So now it’s the job of the newest new starter to look after him. It’s on the probation report and everything!”

Ela gives her a skeptical look. “Is it?”

“Well . . . do you wanna risk finding out the hard way?”

Ela laughs, kisses Doctor K. on his felty nose, and tucks him securely in the crook of her arm. Vi grins at her in response, big and genuine.

“You’ll do fine,” she says, voice warm and kind. Then she seems to remember something. “Oh! And, uh. If you come in one morning and there’s a severed arm or whatever on your desk? It’s not real. Or, like. It _is_ real, but it didn’t come from a person; they’re cloning them in the Skunkworks. For, like, transplants and whatever, you know?”

And Ela smiles, small and real and _so happy_ , and says, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

* * *

“And this is where the magic happens!”

One more elevator ride, this time in the “real lift”—the one with buttons that go to floors like “Dissection” and “Exopathology” and “Breach-tech”—and Ela is stepping out onto Level 7.

“Everyone!” Vi yells, out across the array of cubicles and workspaces. “Cat V Alert! Big Sister is here!”

People emerge. Maybe two dozen; a hasty array of men and women and more in lab coats and pencil skirts and jeans and tailored three-piece suits. Doctors and engineers and neuroscientists and psychologists, bright eyed and eager as they shake Ela’s hand and tell her they’re so glad she’s here, that they’re excited to work with her, that they’ve done absolutely everything they can, and if she has any questions or any problems at all to come to them, immediately, so they can help.

Team Rockstar, Vi had said and, suddenly, Ela feels it. And tries not to hyperventilate.

“Okay, so like . . . Lifts, toilets. Kitchen is down that end, and here . . .” Vi leads them around a wall, into the open space at the centre of the floor. “Ta-da! Say hello to your new Drift partner, Aurora.”

It is . . . a brain. In a jar. Enormous, filling the space floor-to-ceiling, at the centre of what Ela would otherwise have described as a breakout area, with lounge chairs and beanbags and low tables collecting an assortment of puzzles and games. Even a small elevated area with a keyboard and guitar and microphone.

“Aurora . . .”

The Last Kaiju, they’d called her. The last, and the first. She’d slept on the ocean floor until after the Breach had long closed, named by Lena Gottlieb, who’d been there to witness her demise.

The fluid in the tank is golden, illuminated from within and casting the space in a reverent, almost dream-like light. Ela walks to the glass, almost in spite of herself, and raises a hand to touch. She isn’t the first; dozens of fingerprints blur the surface beneath hers, laid side-by-side with a collage of cheerful stickers and tacked-on pictures. Families, scenery, depictions of the living Aurora. Memes. Cartoons. Even meeting notes, scrawled in marker straight onto the glass.

“Her secondary brain,” says Vi. “They managed to save most of it. Doc says her k-lobe, the thing that connects her to the Anteverse, is . . . damaged. Got hit by the Jaeger and maybe didn’t grow right in the first place. He thinks she’s your best shot.”

To Drift, to enter the Hive.

“Is she . . . alive?”

A man steps forward; Doctor Yi, xenoneurologist. He gestures to a bank of monitors fastened to the far side of the tank, the one not facing the wall of plate-glass windows. “Artificially, but more-or-less. Her EEG is similar to that of Doctor Geiszler when he’s asleep,” he says. “She’s dreaming, basically.”

“We’ve been hooking her up,” Vi adds. “That’s what the cameras and the mic are for. So she can see around this space and out the window and hear what people tell her.”

“The interface is still crude,” says Yi. “But she does get some input, yes.”

One of the notes on the glass reads: IN K2 TOWER, SPECIMEN TANK TAP ON YOU. There are a row of memetic variants on the mad scientist “they called me mad!” theme. Another print-out of a cartoon titled “Caveman Science Fiction”, showing the titular character ironically punished for “playing god” with inventions such as fire and stone tools. Ela thinks she understands. People are afraid. But better to shoot for the stars and fall short than to do nothing and die, ignorant and miserable, in the mud.

“Hello, Aurora,” she tells the tank. “I hope we can get to know each other soon.” Then she steps back.

There’s one final stop on the tour.

“Ta-da!” Vi announces, coming to a stop outside a door. The surface has been painted, irezumi-style, with the character 姉, flanked by depictions of Aurora and Otouto. “I present to you . . . your office!” She opens the door with a flourish.

Inside is . . . an office. It’s a nice office, with a desk and a lounge setting and a window looking out over the Boneslum. There’s more stylized art of kaiju on the walls, and tastefully minimalist arrangements of flowers on the bookshelf. Ela has never had an office before. She’s never felt she deserved one. She still doesn’t.

“Log on and get yourself settled,” Vi tells her. “I’m sure the team will start booking you with meetings and overloading you with boring reports in no time. And again: welcome to K2. Whatever happens, we’re all really glad you’re here.”

* * *

For a week, nothing much happens. Or rather, a great deal happens, but it’s all weirdly . . . normal. Corporate. Ela goes to meetings and is emailed roughly ten thousand pages of dense scientific reports to read. They’re over her head, all of them, and she spends Tuesday morning staring out the window feeling very small and very stupid in a tower of geniuses. She didn’t even finish college. How can she possibly think she belongs here?

Then she gives up, storms out, and asks Doctor Yi for clarification. And he’s tremendously apologetic and tremendously helpful, and Ela ends up with a crash-course on introductory astrobiology, taught by the best scientists in the world.

On Wednesday, she has the first lesson in an introductory course on Cantonese and HKSL, and specifically the dialect of the latter spoken by Doctor Geiszler. She knows a little ASL from her old life, which delights the tutor, and while Cantonese intimidates her at first, she finds it simpler than she’d been expecting. It’s neat and orderly and the characters are just pictures; Ela’s never had problems thinking in pictures.

Exploring the city on her way home that evening, she passes a bookstore and gets an idea. Which is how she ends up on a couch next to Aurora the next day, reading slowly and patiently from familiar pages.

“What is this? Storytime With Kaiju Brain?”

Ela startles, slamming _Where the Wild Things Are_ shut as if she’s been caught doing something wrong. “Um . . .” she says.

Doctor Geiszler looks back at her, bright eyed and open-mouthed. “No, I love it.” Today, his gloves themselves seem to be the speakers. “It’s perfect. Do more. Later. For now, come on; the paperwork came through from the city. So it’s K-Science Field Trip time.”

So Ela fetches her purse, and follows the Doctor out of K2. Somewhat circuitously, to try and avoid the dozens of people who seem to sprout from nowhere to ask him questions, despite the early hour. When they finally make it to the street, the sky is a steely grey to match the large military-style truck that takes up most of the road.

“Not the most luxurious ride, but . . .” Doctor Geiszler slaps his hips and winks, leaping up in the back of the vehicle in a single hop. Ela is considering the logistics of her own ascent when the Doctor lowers a big palm to stepping height.

“Just stand on it,” he tells her.

So Ela does, only a little wobbly on her stilettos, holding onto the scales of an enormous bicep to steady herself as she’s lifted into the truck.

“How’re you settling in?” Geiszler asks her, once he’s signaled to the driver to start moving. He takes up most of the front half of the back of the truck, hunched over under the too-low ceiling. So much that Ela is almost crammed right against the back door. “Tell me _aa-aa-all_ the gory details. What horrible lies have my staff been telling you— no, wait. What horrible lies have _Hermann_ ’s staff being telling you. _My_ staff are prefect angels and scientific geniuses, obviously.”

So Ela is very careful to praise everyone’s kindness and patience and professionalism, and it’s only when she gets to that last part that Geiszler lets out the strange barking Ela knows means he’s laughing and says: “You’re such a terrible liar. It’s adorable. Seriously have they left an arm on your desk yet? Was it _my_ arm?”

“I was warned about the arm,” Els confesses.

Geiszler makes a disappointed kind of _tsk_ sound. “Vi, right? It sounds like Vi. She had an, um, interesting probation period so is, like, determined to ensure no one else has to go defeat a boat full of international terrorists in order to figure out what their job actually is.”

“I, um . . . I think that’s very gracious of her?” Ela tries, and gets another barking laugh for her efforts.

 _He talks non-stop full-stop,_ Vi had said and, as it turned out, she’s been right. Geiszler asks Ela about her office and her team and her lessons and how she’s settling into the city and whether she’s figured out the MTR. He gives her a laundry list of things to see and do (“Do you know there’s a Disneyland here? Wild, right? Most people forget.”) and by the time the truck stops Ela’s forgotten to ask where they’re actually going.

“Ta da!” Geiszler announces when he helps her down into a completely interchangeable underground parking garage. The announcement sounds strange in his flatly affected voice. “Welcome to the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Home sweet home.”

There’s more paperwork, this time at a security desk that’s more like what Ela expects for a multinational bureaucratic agency, and Ela ends up with a second passcard printed with a jaundiced mug-shot.

“If I’d known we were getting photos I would’ve worn different make up,” she sighs, and earns another laugh.

“Everyone had to have a terrible ID photo; it’s in the standard. If you like your photo, by law they have to re-take it.”

Doctor Geiszler gives her a tour of the ‘Dome, introducing her to dozens of people whose names she will never remember. There seems to be some kind of deployment going on—LOCCENT is crawling with activity and one of the Jaeger is missing from it’s giant bay—but he tells her not to worry about it, that it’s just “boring bureaucratic shit.”

In the basement laboratory, she meets Doctor Gottlieb in person for the first time. He’s somehow even _more_ severe and terrifying in person than in photos and on the phone, and regards her with an absolutely withering look as he says, “Miss Kaya, Doctor Geiszler’s newest kaiju groupie. Already causing quite a stir, I see.”

“Um . . . I didn’t mean to?” she tries, mostly because she didn’t think she _was_ , and gets a disapproving _tsk_ for her efforts.

“I shall tell Vanessa her nail lacquers are hitting their target market, at least.”

“Oh god,” says Ela, and wants to die.

Doctor Geiszler just laughs at them both.

“Believe it or not,” he tells her later in an elevator, “that was him trying to make friendly small-talk. And it’s not you he’s pissed at.”

“It’s the Programme,” Ela guesses.

“His dad, actually,” comes the reply. “Lars’s been pushing this whole Drift thing hard pretty much from the moment Otouto landed. He’s the only reason it got off the ground.”

“Oh.” And Ela knows, because _every_ stan knows, that the relationship between the Gottliebs is . . . not good. And hasn’t been for a long, long time. “Um. Why?”

Doctor Geiszler sighs dramatically and rolls a multitude of eyes. “Lars is convinced I gave Hermann brain worms—like, evil brain worms—and am using him to corrupt the PPDC on behalf of the Anteverse. He’s been looking for ways to try and prove it.”

“Oh,” says Ela. Because what else is there to say upon discovering your dream job is apparently a sacrifice-play on behalf of someone else’s misguided crusade?

Doctor Geiszler regards her for a moment, then: “People are going to think that about you soon, too.”

“I know,” says Ela, thinking of Maria and the way Chloe won’t return her emails and the worried looks her parents give whenever she calls them.

“And it might be true.”

Ela turns to him, wide-eyed. “I—”

“I mean, don’t get me wrong; I don’t think it’s true. I don’t want it to be true. But, like. Real talk between the only people in the world who have-slash-are-about-to-get a direct line installed? We don’t really know. That’s what’s so fucked up. We just . . .” A shrug. “We don’t know. It’s your fucking brain, man. If Lars is right, we might not even know just how messed up we all really are.”

“But . . . other people would,” Ela points out. “The Marshal, the Security Council. The other Shatterdomes . . . someone would notice something was wrong.”

“See,” says Doctor Geiszler as the elevator doors open, “that’s exactly the problem; some people think they already have.”

* * *

And then they step out onto the roof.

It’s a large area, marked out with guardrails and landing pads and scattered with parked helicopters of various sizes. Except Ela isn’t looking at any of that, or noticing the way the rain has set in sometime during their tour and is currently working on flattening her hair and soaking her clothes. Oh no. Not when, in front of her . . .

“Boring bureaucratic shit”, Geiszler had called the Jaeger deployment. Because there it is, standing before her in the bay, standing right next to—

“Otouto.”

That was the paperwork; they needed permission from the city to bring him close, and a Jaeger to supervise.

The Jaeger that’s currently raising its fist, and Ela’s breath catches in her throat except the arm just . . . hangs there. Otouto studies it, curiously, and the Jaeger makes an encouraging gesture with its other hand.

“Aw, no, Larson, don’t—”

And Otouto folds back his enormous claws, and knocks his knuckles gently against the Jaeger’s fist.

“—don’t teach him a _loser_ fist bump, c’mon,” Doctor Geiszler finishes. “Did you see that? I’m so embarrassed right now that you had to witness something so incredibly uncool.” Then, without so much as a pause: “Sec-C makes us send escorts when he’s near land but the Jaeger kinda freak him out. Okay with the Larsons, though, so we’re working on it. C’mon. Let’s go get you two introduced.”

The Jaeger thumps Otouto on the shoulder, a weirdly human gesture, and a flash of bioluminescent flickers across his skin. It’d done the same at the fistbump, too. Kinetic energy absorption; it’d been in Ela’s reading pile, in excruciating scientific detail she hadn’t understood. She had gathered it’s one of the reasons he can survive in the Pacific, sustaining himself on the motion of the waves and chasing storms to devour the lightning.

And then he’s turning her way, and _sees_ her.

He is . . . Ela doesn’t have words for it. Awesome, in both the formal and colloquial senses of the word. Filling her entire vision as he crouches closer, head tilted to focus on her with a row of four brilliant blue eyes, glimmering like alien suns, light catching and turning the rain to starfall. And suddenly Ela realizes she was wrong, up on Hawk Hill. It _is_ like being in the presence of a god. Primal and atavistic.

“Um,” says Ela. “Hello?”

“He can understand you,” Geiszler tells her. “Sort of. Because I do. Like I mean it’s not like he magically speaks English and is gonna start pumping out essays, but he gets the gist.”

“My name’s Ela,” she says in response. She can see her own reflection in his eye, distorted and so, so tiny. “I hope we can be friends.”

In response, she gets a low rumble. So deep she feels it in her bones.

“They didn’t really do the whole ‘friends’ thing, back home,” Doctor Geiszler translates. “He’s pretty excited to try it. I think whatever they’re built from must’ve been pretty highly social, at some point. I mean . . . hive mind kinda implies it, right?”

He’s _so close_. And it’s terrifying, Ela would be lying to say it wasn’t. But it’s terrifying like standing atop the bungee platform was terrifying, that one time Chloe convinced her to try it at the Rio Grande. Exhilarating, addictive. God, she feels _alive_.

She reaches out, almost without thinking, then hesitates and—

“You can touch him, though he mig— yup there he goes.”

He’s moving. Ela stumbles back, pure instinct; he fills so much of her vision his motion feels like _she’s_ moving, vertiginous and disorientating. He’s pulling back, just slightly and . . . and _opening_ , outer jaws unfolding to reveal the brilliant crimson of the head beneath.

The smell of him is overpowering. Not quite the rotting decay Ela has (yes) grown used to at K2, but still salt-ammonia and chemical sharp. And then the mouth of the inner head is opening too, moving closer, hot breath ruffling Ela’s hair and her clothes and Doctor Geiszler says:

“He wants to lick you.”

“W-what?” She jolts to stare at him as, in front of her, a velvety red tongue unfurls.

Geiszler shrugs. “They don’t have a lot of ways of physically interacting with things our size.”

“Is . . . is it dangerous?”

“Compared to what? I mean I hope you’re not too attached to that dress, because it’ll need to get incinerated. But the rain helps and we’ll chuck you into decon right after, so your skin’s not gonna melt off or anything.”

Ela’s dress is an authentic Chanel. Secondhand, but still cost her over two months’ salary. It’s not even a contest, and she steps forward to press herself against the strange, hot surface of Otouto’s tongue.

“Oh god,” she says. “Oh, god I . . .” Can feel his breath, his heartbeat. The slight flex of muscles he’s trying to keep still, trying not to push her or hurt her. Her head is spinning and her heart is hammering and this is _real_ , he’s _real_ and—

“Okay, big guy. That’s enough close encounters; don’t wanna gas Big Sis too bad with your ammonia stank breath.”

He pulls back, and it’s only Doctor Geiszler’s hands catching her that stops Ela from collapsing onto the concrete of the Shatterdome’s roof.

“That was . . . it— it was . . .”

“I know,” says Geiszler, and Ela supposes he does.

* * *

And then, four months from the day Ela first walked into K2, it’s time.

“Last chance to back out,” Doc tells her. “Once we press this big red button . . . boom. Your brain gets irreversibly drilled.”

Ela takes a deep breath. She’s reclined in the modified Pons rig that’s been fitted to the side of Aurora’s tank, Doctor K. clutched in her arms, heavy and familiar guitar riffs playing from the speakers by her head (“To anchor you,” Doctor Geiszler had explained it, then whooped in approval at her track selection). Her whole team is here, clustered around on chairs and at consoles, and Doctor Gottlieb has taken point on the sofa in the corner. (“The nominated responsible adult in the room, when this nonsense all goes tits up.”)

“Do it,” Ela says. “I’m ready.”

“Initiating neural bridge,” says Doctor Yi. “This may feel . . . no. Honestly, I have no idea. Initiating.”

And Ela . . . she isn’t sure what she’s expecting, as the machine around her powers up and begins to hum. Violent flashes? A sudden drop? An overwhelming wave of alien memories? But all she feels is a slowly growing feeling of weightlessness. Calm. Like she’s floating. Like she’s still sitting in the chair but at the same time, she’s also . . . not.

“Sync holding. We’re gonna up the intensity a bit. Ela, you ready?”

“Yes. It’s just . . . this is her, isn’t it? Aurora. I’m feeling what she feels. It’s . . . so peaceful.” _We try and keep her comfortable,_ Vi had told her, weeks ago. An endless sea of golden calm.

Ela’s eyes flutter closed, her mind sinking deeper. Gold and blue. Warmth and rest. And, yes. Unfathomable violence and endless pain but . . . distant, now. Gone.

“Talk to us, E. What are you feeling?”

“Sleepy,” her voice sounds distant, dreamy. She’s not floating any more; she’s sinking. Into a cool, buzzing dark. Tendrils of shadow, brushing through the gold, branching in the blue. A whisper, a hum. She can hear voices, the horrible clash of amplified wire, and she frowns, shaking it off. They need to be quiet. The whisper . . . she can’t hear the whisper. Not when they’re _so loud_. She just needs a little more, to get a little closer, and she’ll hear—

“Ela!”

Pain, sharp pain, lancing up her arm.

Ela gasps, eyes flying open, the reality of the lab rushing back in a roar of sound and the too-bright too-knowing eyes of Doctor Geiszler, inches from her own.

He has one small hand wrapped around her forearm, claws pressed hard against the skin, just shy of drawing blood. And Ela feels . . . Ela feels . . .

_“First rule of Hive Club: don’t look for the Anteverse.”_

And the voice is . . . there. In her mind. And for a moment Ela sees Doctor Geiszler in front of her and she sees a man, too; with cracked glasses and torn clothing and—

“Oh god, that was— it wanted—”

_“Rule two of Hive Club: Don’t. Look. For the. Anteverse. You get one free pass. Now you know what it feels like. If I so much as see you sneak another peek I will kick you out of this program so hard your ancestors will feel it. You got me?”_

Ela nods. “Y-yes. I know. I know. I didn’t . . . Oh god.”

And Doctor Geiszler’s eyes search hers, and his mind . . . God. She can _feel_ him. He’s like . . . like fireworks. An endlessly large and endlessly tiny ball of exploding light and sound and thought, deafeningly loud and blindingly brilliant; an entire universe, crammed onto a pinhead.

And, at the centre, that awful, seeping, humming darkness. A black and ugly scar. A corruption.

One that’s now in her, too.

Doctor Geiszler’s expression softens— no, his _thoughts_ soften, and he pulls back.

 _“All right,”_ says the man with the smeared blood and the broken glasses and the one, mad red eye. _“Give yourself a moment, take a deep breath or whatever, and we’ll go back in.”_

“I can’t . . . What if it— What if I’m not strong enough to stop it?”

“We don’t need you to be strong, Ms. Kaya. We need you to be _you_. Hold onto that.” From the corner, from Doctor Gottlieb . . . but closer, too. She hears the words like she hears Doc’s words. Hears them _through_ him.

And she hears what he doesn’t say, too: They don’t need her to be strong. They need her to be disgustingly soft-hearted and sickeningly naive. To be of no great intelligence and no accomplishment or influence. To be _ordinary_. So ordinary—so ordinarily human—the Anteverse could never possibly hope to understand her. Could never have anything she wanted and never think to use her as a weapon.

And suddenly it hits her; this is the hive mind. She’s _in it_ , connected through Aurora in the same way Doctor Gottlieb is connected through Doctor Geiszler. And they’re right; it’s not a Drift. Ela has spent the last four months reading every firsthand description the PPDC could give her, trying to prepare. And this . . . this is not it.

“Okay,” says Ela. “Okay. I’m . . . I’m ready.” She takes a deep breath, then another. Tries to time them to the pounding backbeat of the music. Squeezes Doctor K., feels the mangled felt beneath her fingers.

Then she closes her eyes, and lets herself float.

No. Not float. _Swim_. Into the blue; bright and hot and alien, vaster than the golden calm, more furious than the whispering dark. And she focuses, and it gets closer and closer and faster and faster, rising like a tidal wave, like a typhoon, a thousand broken memories, a wall of pain and frustration and rage and sorrow and it crashes over her and—

_“Where are you? What do you feel?”_

“Wet. Cold.” Ela gasps. She can see it; she’s standing in the ocean, waves rising a hundred feet and barely brushing her jaw. And around the edges, enormous hulking shapes, backlit with violent lightning, jagged and vicious and—

“Oh god. Is that—?”

 _“What Jaeger look like to a kaiju they’re about to kill?”_ And then Doctor Geiszler is there. He’s there and he’s not there, walking through the waves, over them, wet and broken and whole and alive and human and kaiju, everything all at once, all the time. Infinite regressions, Newtons all the way down. Ela wonders what she looks like to him. Wonders if she really wants to know. _“Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?”_

Ela turns, she shifts her attention (she turns; she can feel the chair’s pillow under her cheek). The Shatterdome looms, a huge impenetrable shadow, but _blinding_ , too. Calling. There is a fire inside, like her and not like her, and it sings strange words of beckoning and refusal, and beneath it is a cool, solid core, and they show her things she doesn’t understand; warm things, soft things. Hot and yelling things. Together things, and—

_“Yeah, okay. Rule three of Hive Club; don’t go spelunking in other people’s brains without their permission. Not a Drift, remember? None of that ‘oops I accidentally watched you lose your virginity in your brain’ awkwardness here.”_

Ela blinks, snaps back into herself, into the present.

“This is—”

_“Aurora’s last memory, yeah. And that’s me and Herms inside the dome— Well, Herms was in the city, but from her perspective he was here.”_

“Newton I can _hear_ what you’re calling me. For Heaven’s sake this is a formal experiment; at least the pretense of decorum, please.” Here and not here, coming from nowhere and inside and far away, all at once.

Doctor Geiszler rolls his eyes. Human and kaiju, flickering self-perceptions, almost but not quite in sync. But both warm, fond. Dusty wool and pale chalk, gentle hands and soothing thoughts.

 _“Fine, fine._ Doctor _Herms.”_

“Newton I swear I will—”

_“Okay, don’t worry about him, c’mon. Science to do. First two steps, done. Ready for the big finale, Big Sister?”_

“Yes.” Ela nods, hands clasping, feeling felt and seaspray and wickedly long claws, curling into enormous palms. “Yes, I’m ready.”

_“Then go find him.”_

_Brother._ Ela thinks it, the thought echoing around them like a thunderclap, like a clarion, like a roar. And the water beneath her feet is opening up, and she’s diving, down and down and down. Not into the empty hum but into an endless, frozen blue. She gasps, panicked—too dark, too cold, too airless—but . . . but no, her hide is more then enough to take the weight, her senses sharp enough to pierce the shadow, her gills fine enough to draw breath.

There’s a light in the dark, and she dives towards it, marine snow falling like stars around her descent, down to the places the humans never go, to the secret dark, milky-white ghosts drifting past in strange undulations and many-legged roils.

And then she sees him, finds him, and she knows him, and he knows her. And there are no words, no thought, just feeling. Awe and welcome and joy. And they reach to each other, alien and strange, and somewhere across thousands of miles of ocean dark, Ela feels tears, rolling down her cheeks, like the abyss itself has filled her so full it has nowhere else to go.

And someone is saying: “Ela, Ela can you hear me? What do you see? What can you feel?”

And Ela smiles with teeth too small and too blunt as the star-struck dark spreads around her, on and on and on, and she says:

“Free.”

**Author's Note:**

> Shot...
> 
>  _self-image confidence troubled comfortable blame touching partake_  
>  _with grace jealousy wisdom unabashed joy and me you yum_  
>  _power transference to equality letting go joy again_  
>  _loving do unto others as to yourself,[thank you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urzfTvI8I7o)_


End file.
